Editorial: Hands-on school board welcome, but trustees going too far

Washoe County School School Board members Lisa Ruggerio, left, and Estela Gutierrez during a meeting in January.

The hands-on, questioning, passionate, involved attitude that the current members of the Washoe County School District's Board of Trustees have is a welcome change from the past, when trustees often seemed too willing to defer to the professional staff.

That said, it's also true that 10-hour meetings are no way to create sound, effective policies for the schools. If the trustees are indeed spending that much time to get through their agendas, as reported by the Gazette-Journal's Siobhan McAndrew [RGJ In-Depth, Feb. 9], then the board is taking on too many tasks that would be better left to Superintendent Pedro Martinez and his staff.

It is a difficult balancing act for the trustees, who are ultimately responsible to the voters for the quality of education in Washoe County, as well as for being good stewards of the district's funds. The failure of the board to convince the Washoe County Commission to approve a tax increase for school maintenance authorized by the Legislature last year demonstrated a troubling lack of trust in the district.

But, in trying to micromanage everything that goes on in the district, from the evaluating of teachers to the naming of schools and the provision of fresh milk to the cafeterias, they risk burning themselves out (already one, Estela Gutierrez, has announced that she will not run for re-election this year) and scaring off candidates except for those few who who are retired and have nothing else to do with their time.

To a person, when running for the office, candidates for the school board insist that the trustees' most important job is to hire a good superintendent. Most, if not all, of the current trustees say that they have done that with Martinez.

Yet, the board slowly but surely has been moving powers away from the superintendent's office and taking it upon themselves. As McAndrew reported, both the district's legal counsel and its auditor, who previously reported to the superintendent, now report directly to the board. The board took away the superintendent's authority to decide on school names and overturned the awarding of a low-bidder contract for milk in favor of a Reno-based dairy.

Much of this is cyclical.

A previous board gave the superintendent responsibility for choosing names for new schools to take politics out of the process, for instance. (Some years ago, schools in Washoe County often were named for sitting school board members.) Just a few years ago, the pendulum appeared to swing too far in favor of a disconnected school board that sometimes seemed in awe of the superintendent it had chosen.

In part, that may have been because a majority of the board's members were former school administrators and teachers. But the board makeup has undergone a welcome change, and only two members, Vice President Barbara McLaury, whose current term expires in 2016, and John Mayer, who announced Monday that he'll run for re-election this year, are former principals.

The danger now is that the pendulum is swinging too far in the opposite direction. Trustee Lisa Ruggerio says that she works 40 hours preparing for meetings, which makes the board a full-time job, not the part-time job it's supposed to be.

Residents undoubtedly want to see the trustees closely involved. Parents want them to ensure that their children are getting the best education; taxpayers want to know they're getting the most for their dollars. Do they care where their kids' milk comes from? That's a job best left to administrators.

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Editorial: Hands-on school board welcome, but trustees going too far

The hands-on, questioning, passionate, involved attitude that the current members of the Washoe County School District's Board of Trustees have is a welcome change from the past, when trustees often

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